How to Stop Negative Thinking that Comes from Within You

In our pre­vi­ous post, we talked about what is neg­a­tive think­ing and rea­sons that caused those neg­a­tive think­ing. Today, we are going to talk about how to stop the neg­a­tive thinking.

There are two ways to tackle the prob­lem of neg­a­tive think­ing, the approach you choose will depend on the source of that think­ing. The first approach deals with neg­a­tive think­ing that comes from your own thoughts and actions. The sec­ond approach deals with the com­ments and actions of others.

To stop neg­a­tive think­ing that comes from Within You­self (inter­nal) will need to work to change your inse­cu­ri­ties and your reac­tions to neg­a­tive self-talk. Below are some of the tips that could guide you to get this process done.

Become Aware of Your Thoughts and Reactions

In order to stop neg­a­tive think­ing, you must first be aware that it exists. To do this you must make a con­scious effort to pay atten­tion to your thoughts.

There are two ways to accom­plish this. You can either keep a note­book handy and jot down the thoughts run­ning through your head every time a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion arises, or you can set aside some time and pur­posely think about a dif­fi­cult sit­u­a­tion while you write your neg­a­tive thoughts down. Either tech­nique will work as long as you do not try to sup­press the neg­a­tive thoughts and as long as you remem­ber to write each and every thought down.

Once you com­plete your neg­a­tive think­ing self-talk, you can move on to the next step, which involves exam­in­ing that self-talk.

Chal­lenge Your Neg­a­tive Thinking

Yes, you need to chal­lenge its ratio­nal­ity. For this step you will need to go over your list of neg­a­tive thoughts that you jot­ted down and exam­ine each one indi­vid­u­ally. For each thought, ask the fol­low­ing question.

1. Is this thought based on the real­ity of the sit­u­a­tion?
2. What facts can you find to back this thought up?
3. What emo­tions does this thought evoke?
4. Is this thought tied to a past fail­ure or event?
5. Can this thought be changed?

Now that you know which ques­tions to ask, then you need to put this step into practice.

Let’s say or image that one of your neg­a­tive thoughts is you think you will never be able to write a com­pelling sales letter.

Is this thought based on real­ity? Do you have any skills or back­ground on this topic? If you do, then this thought is irra­tional and most likely it just based on your feel­ings of inse­cu­rity. If you don’t, then you can always find the resources to help you to attain these skills. Once the appro­pri­ate skills are attained, this neg­a­tive thought will be eliminated.

For the back up facts towards you can­not write a com­pelling sales let­ter, it may because you writ­ten one that failed before? If so, review that let­ter and deter­mine what you can do to make it bet­ter. If not, then find out what are the other facts that are con­tribut­ing to this thought? It per­haps because you have a lack of expe­ri­ence with the topic or inad­e­quate knowl­edge of the task itself. Both of these facts can be changed with a lit­tle effort and research.

What emo­tions are tied to the act of writ­ing the sales let­ter? Do you have a fear of fail­ing? What­ever the emo­tion is, you need to remind your­self that emo­tions are not facts. Rather, they are just asso­ci­ated feel­ings which can be changed or elim­i­nated through pos­i­tive think­ing tech­niques.

Is the thought tied to a past fail­ure or event? If the answer is yes, remind your­self that this sit­u­a­tion is a com­pletely dif­fer­ent event which con­tains dif­fer­ent pos­si­bil­i­ties, and you can use your pos­i­tive think­ing skills to change the out­come of the event.

Can this thought be changed? As you can see from the pre­vi­ous answers, almost every neg­a­tive thought can be changed in some way or another. The key to this ques­tion is to rec­og­nize the extent to which the change can take place. If your neg­a­tive thought did have any fac­tual basis then the reality-based parts of the thought can­not be changed, but your feel­ings and reac­tions to the thought can be.

Cor­rect Your Neg­a­tive Thoughts

Now that you have good under­stand­ing of your neg­a­tive think­ing and its ori­gins, you can begin turn­ing those thoughts into pos­i­tive think­ing. So, how do you cor­rect neg­a­tive think­ing? You can change the lan­guage of the thought by using pos­i­tive words and you turn the neg­a­tive state­ment into a pos­i­tive affirmation.

For prac­tice, let’s turn the neg­a­tive thought “I will never be able to write a com­pelling sales let­ter” into a pos­i­tive affir­ma­tion, example.

First, we need to address any facts that con­tained in this state­ment. Let’s assume that you did write a pre­vi­ous sales let­ter but it failed and you do lack of the expe­ri­ence to write a bet­ter one. The first part of your affir­ma­tion will need to be writ­ten to reflect these facts in a pos­i­tive man­ner. For exam­ple, you could say, “I can read a book about suc­cess­ful sales let­ters and fol­low the exam­ples to cre­ate my own win­ning letter”.

Sec­ondly, we need to address any emo­tions that were attached to the neg­a­tive thought. For instance, you could say, “I have pre­pared thor­oughly for this task and I know that I can suc­ceed this time around”.

Last, we need to change the lan­guage of the thought. Here, you could say, “I will write a com­pelling sales letter.”

Now, let’s com­pare the two statements.

* Neg­a­tive thought: “I will never be able to write a com­pelling sales letter.”

* Pos­i­tive affir­ma­tion: “I can read a book about suc­cess­ful sales let­ters and fol­low the exam­ples to cre­ate my own win­ning let­ter. I have pre­pared thor­oughly for this task and I know that I can suc­ceed this time around. I will write a com­pelling sales letter.”

See the dif­fer­ence? Now that you have a pos­i­tive affir­ma­tion in place to chal­lenge and cor­rect the orig­i­nal neg­a­tive thought, just repeat it fre­quently until you have over­come your neg­a­tiv­ity and com­pleted the task in a desir­able and delib­er­ate way.